'Pol, give them the chance to surrender.'
Blancanales shouted out in Spanish for the survivors to throw away their weapons.
Below, one of the men wounded by Lyons, flat on his back with his shattered legs twisted beneath him, raised his arms. Another man, his intestines spilling from his shirt, died even as he called for mercy. The third man, a broken arm limp at his side, waved one hand and stood.
An Uzi-burst from the Salvadorans in the gully killed him. Lyons spoke into his hand-radio again.
'Wizard, give those three the pop.'
'Put out some rounds to distract them, then,' said Gadgets's voice.
As Lyons sprayed the three Salvadorans with buckshot, Gadgets touched the radio-trigger at his side to send a radio impulse to a charge he had placed in the gully.
Much like the monofilament and grenade booby traps Blancanales had placed, the device Gadgets had improvised utilized a can and a grenade. However, Gadgets used a radio-triggered fuse — a tiny bit of RDX usually planted inside a brick of C-4 plastic explosive to ignite the main charge — to propel the grenade from the can.
As the steel shot from Lyons's booming Atchisson hit the rocks around them, the three Salvadorans stayed low, their faces against the earth. They did not notice the grenade propelled straight into the air by the tiny explosion of the fuse. A length of monofilament prevented the grenade from flying too far or bouncing away. When the grenade had flown to the end of its tether, it snapped back and clattered on the rocks among the men.
They died without seeing what killed them.
Gadgets laughed into his hand-radio. 'Presto, deado.'
'I'm going out there,' Lyons radioed his partners. 'Cover me.'
Jamming a full magazine into his Atchisson, Lyons left his concealment on the hillside. His steps slow with the weight of the Kevlar-and-steel battle armor, he eased down the treacherous slope, his Atchisson cocked and unlocked and set on full-auto, his right index finger straight beside his Atchisson's trigger. He needed only to clench his fist to send a devastating blast of high-velocity steel from the weapon.
On the scraped earth of the loading area, Lyons scanned the dead and wounded. He saw several of the men he had wounded, now dead in immense pools of clotting blood.
Going to one of the Salvadorans who still lived, he kicked the man's Uzi away. Atchisson ready in his right hand, Lyons reached under the wounded man's jacket and pulled a Browning 9mm auto-pistol from a shoulder holster. Tossing the Browning aside, he glanced at the man's shattered legs. One leg bled from a pattern of buckshot holes. The other leg, the femur shattered, twisted at a right angle. Lyons keyed his hand-radio.
'Pol, this one needs immediate first aid.'
'On my way.'
21
Flat in the dust under the Silverado, Captain Madrano watched the black-clad North American walk away. The captain had lost all his men, but he still held his Uzi. He watched the other North Americans come down from the hillsides.
Could he kill them all with his Uzi? No. Perhaps he could kill one. No. Why throw away his life with a last, suicidal attack on the enemy?
Smoke from the burning motor home drifted through the clearing. Captain Madrano saw the smoke obscure the scene for a moment. The slight wind blew the black cloud past the Silverado. Madrano watched the three armored North Americans check the Salvadorans. The Negro stayed back at a safe distance.
Captain Madrano knew he had only one chance to live. He waited for the wind to shift again.
A gust blew the smoke one way, then the wind faded. A billowing black wall descended on the Silverados. Madrano slithered backward from under the truck. Keeping the truck between him and the North Americans, he scrambled back.
When he gained the cover of weeds and a tangle of litter dumped at the side of the road, he burrowed into the trash like an animal. Concealed, he waited until he heard one of the Silverados start up. Only after the North Americans departed did Captain Madrano dare to emerge into the daylight.
Throwing away his weapons, he walked to the highway, plotting revenge every step of the way.
22
As local and federal officers photographed the dead Salvadorans, Agent Gallucci of the Federal Bureau of Investigation surveyed the scene.
Stinking soot and smoke still rose from the ruin of the motor home, the aluminum frame and shell melted and commingled with the ashes of the interior materials.
Scorched human bones lay in the gleaming pools of once-molten iridescent aluminum. Farther away from the smoking hulk, more Salvadorans lay where they had died. As if to declare their identities, the corpses clutched their passports and tourist visas. Their killers had searched their pockets for the identification, then left the official documents in their stiffening hands.
Though the papers stated the young men represented a group of visiting Mexican businessmen, their hard muscles, their military-short hairstyles identified the dead men as soldiers or paramilitary fighters.
Their wounds left no doubt as to the military weapons of their killers. Dismembered by grenades, their heads and torsos torn open by auto-fire, the 5.56mm and 40mm cartridge casings found on the hillside only confirmed what Gallucci immediately recognized.
But the hideous wounds to some of the Salvadorans confused him. How could the gunman who killed the men — obviously with a shotgun — have chambered and fired shells so fast and with such devastating accuracy?
A farmer on the far side of the hill had reported hearing a fury of gunshots and explosions. Before he could cross his equipment yard to his telephone, the shooting stopped. The slaughter of these Salvadorans had taken no more than a few minutes.
The number of wounds in the dead men indicated continuous firing from a semi-automatic short-barreled weapon. No weapon Gallucci knew of could put out the sustained volume of fire indicated by the twenty-one shotgun casings on the hillside — all of a common manufacturer. Only the scratches on the casings' brass bases indicating an unusual extractor mechanism would provide the laboratory with any detail for analysis.
'Mr. Gallucci! Over here.' One of the San Jose county sheriffs called him over to a Silverado truck.
'Look at this…' The sheriff pointed to a pattern of holes in the passenger-side door.
Holes of .30 caliber and other holes not much larger than pinpoints created the outline of a man's legs. Chipped enamel indicated where other shot balls had lost velocity as they passed through the man's legs and only dented the truck's sheet steel. A trail of blood from the truck led to a corpse in the weeds.
Gallucci looked up at the hillside to confirm the angle of aim to the door panel. He examined the holes punched into the truck's steel.
The sheriff explained. 'Only time I've seen buckshot penetrate a car is point-blank, straight on. But look. I estimate twenty-five yards from where the shotgunner fired. At a twenty-something degree angle. But his pellets — looks like a mixed load, buckshot and bird shot — they went straight through the sheet metal. Except for where that Mexican was standing. And the shot went through him and still dented the door.'
'It'll give the lab something to think about,' Gallucci told him.
'Me, too. Someone is running around who I don't want to meet.'
Gallucci noticed marks in the dust of the road. As if continuing his search for more evidence, the FBI officer walked away from the county sheriff.
On the other side of the Silverado, handprints and the wider prints of knees indicated a man had crawled from under the truck to the other side of the road. Gallucci continued to the roadside. The handprints and scuffs showed where the escaping man had gained the concealment of weeds and trash. Footprints from the trash led
